> (1) Only URL's need to be broadcast with a couple of criptic tag-id's > - so none of this would resemble a typical Twitter message that is > made up of words and sentences.
I just asked a related question, where the actual tweet message is not all that interesting or grokkable. Ideally I think we want a "back channel" attribute on the tweet that says "this tweet is unsuitable for direct human consumption". > (2) The same application would need to "subscribe" to messages from a > single Twitter user, without forcing application users to create their > own individual accounts. You don't need credentials to consume the search api at http://search.twitter.com, so you can do something as simple as http://search.twitter.com/search.js?rpp=100&since_id=xxx&q=from:yyyy where yyy is your tweeting user's screen name and the xxx is the last tweet that you got from your prior query. Note that you may miss messages in this because search doesn't surface every tweet and is only K-sorted... no guarantees. More details here http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/search You could ALSO follow a user/list on the client, but that requires credentials. Finally, you could (if a desktop application, for now) consume a UserStream at each client (or in a proxy server for each), but that will also require credentials on the client (or proxy) site. As for acquiring client credentials, you could have a commissioning/ setup process on your side to create those credentials (create user account, OAuth, follow, etc) and then pass this AccessToken and TokenSecret to the client applications. This would have to be partially manual simply because [THANK ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY] twitter accounts creation is still not automatable (captchas and all). > If not twitter, is there some other service that provides free and > reliable messaging services, as described above. Well, Twitter is not (sorry guys) what I would call a "reliable messaging service". It's kind of (potentially) lossy, so you're going to need a wrapper around that for transactional symantics (like direct messages back to the producer when the message sequence number -- yours, not the tweet id -- is out of order or skipping) to handle the retries and such. Frankly, if you can't handle the lossy nature, you should probably be looking at something like Amazon's Simple Messaging Service http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/ or Simple Notification Service http://aws.amazon.com/sns/ both are excellent products. Marc Hack Prime Infuz / BuzzRadius / STLTweets
